For nurses, the time to accept things as they are is long past. Leaders make things better. Will nurses lead, or act the part of sheep?

The time for nurses to gather our vast numbers, our deep knowledge, experience and heart, our unending tenacity, courage, and will, and our sterling professional reputation and put these resources to proper use.

Nurses are routinely abused, overworked, and disrespected every day across America: more so each day. Every day, nurses are pressured that much harder to serve profits more than patients’ live and health. Every day, nurses see the American health care system serve profits more, and health less. So much of our potential to benefit the American public remains untapped, wasted as so many of our numbers are forced to focus on survival each day instead of building a better future for all Americans.

The time for change is long overdue.

Will Nurses rise to this historic challenge and forge solutions, as Florence Nightingale did against the will of the ruling class of the British Empire at the height of its power? If she could create modern Nursing from scratch under such deeply adverse conditions, who are we to say there’s nothing we can do? Could we look into her eyes and tell her we choose to do nothing? Could you?

Dare we accept our lot? If so, we will become serfs in time, sooner than most people imagine. Peasants, powerless and desperate. And we will abandon our patients to a worse fate than our own.

Don’t dare give up, fellow nurses. As individuals we can do little; as a whole we can move mountains, change the course of history. We can rise, unite, and accept nothing less than what we have earned and deserve, what we demand for the patients in our care! We can take our rightly place, steering the course of health care. I suggest it is our destiny: all we need to is grasp it. It is our time, if we make it so.

Let’s get to work. That’s what we do, we nurses: we get it done, we meet our goals. Let’s set worthy goals and get to work.

Sounds great to me! I propose a total business, nurse, and patient (as possible) boycott once. Such posts were banned from one professional site due to liability. Nothing much else came of it then. I’d be happy to take another crack at it, though! I’d neither work in Arizona nor ever voluntarily be a hospital patient there. Too dangerous on both counts.

Thanks for the shout out, and yes, the time is long past…but it’s never too late to start, and I think nurses have an obligation to act on this threat to public health and safety, same as we would to a threat to a patient’s safety!